Early February Johanna Veldman, Anke van den Berg, Arjan Diepstra and Joost Kluiver attended and presented at the first Leopoldina Workshop on Hodgkin Lymphoma and Related Diseases in Halle, Germany. A great and inspiring focused meeting. In this meeting organized by Martin Leo Hansmann, Roland Schmidt and Ralf Kuppers  state-of-the-art research on Hodgkin lymphoma was lively and enthousiastically discussed and is expected to be continued. We are already looking forward to the next meeting.

Kirsten Drost and Sandra Versteeg from the lymphoma research funding organization Lymph&Co visited Anke van den Berg and Joost Kluiver to discuss how their funding helped our research and what outcomes were achieved. We talked about how important such a funding organization is to allow much needed research on lymphoma to better understand the disease and how lymphoma patients may benefit from this.

It is possible to detect Hodgkin lymphoma early by using a simple blood test. This test identifies highly elevated levels of the specific protein TARC, that is secreted by Hodgkin’s tumour cells. In fact, an increased amount of TARC protein can be detected three to six years prior to  diagnosis. This novel finding was revealed by research led by hematopathologist Arjan Diepstra in collaboration with Wouter Plattel, Anke van den Berg and Lydia Visser. It indicates that Hodgkin lymphoma is a relatively slow-growing tumour that often exists for a long time before symptoms appear. For more information read here, the full paper can be found here. A recent interview related to this publication can be found here.